


A Small Life

by Wakeywakey_bigmistakey



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Character Study, More characters to be added, it's all about Lexa, kind of?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-06 06:18:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19056934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wakeywakey_bigmistakey/pseuds/Wakeywakey_bigmistakey
Summary: Lexa has her life planned out, but thing doesn't go as she'd imagined and suddenly she has to figure out who she is and who she wants to be





	1. Prologue

The door swings shut and she’s left in the absolute vacuum of unreleased tension, of feelings that have built and built and now have nowhere to go. The cold surface of the ring still digs into her palm, leaving a deep imprinted circle. It had been such a thrill to buy it.

It isn’t an ornate ring, simple silver design with a single ruby in it. In a fit of unfamiliar sentimentality, she’d gotten it inscribed. Along the inside,  _ Costia and Lexa  _ reads clearly in the blocky typewriter font she’d chosen. All useless.

Her jaw clenches and unclenches while she stares into thin air and try to command her tears to stay where they are. A single traitor makes a run for it down her cheek and she wipes it away furiously and much harder than she’d intended.

She had been so sure she’d say yes.  _ I can’t bear your pain for you _ . That’s what Costia said. Lexa doesn’t know how long she’s been sitting there when she gets up, but the light has changed and everything aches. The proposal plays over and over in her mind. 

_ I can’t bear your pain for you, Lexa _ . 

Over and over and over again, it punches holes clean through her chest and everything seems so hollow. 

_ You need to figure out how to exist in your own right _ .

Dazed, Lexa looks over her apartment. Her beloved apartment. As her eyes sweep over the various surfaces, a tight ball forms in the deepest pit of her stomach. Every single thing she loves -every knick-knack, every photo, all that set it apart from any other apartment- was shared with Costia. 

She sits on the bed. The door closing behind Costia still reverberates down her spine. Green eyes still unable to focus on anything specific, still unseeing, she raises a hand to touch her own face. She presses down harder when it still doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel  _ there _ . 

From the window, the last light of day shines orange patterns on the opposite wall. It’s such a lovely evening. Lexa can see how it would’ve played out; how Costia would have laughed so hard and kissed her so soft. How they’d have stayed up all night to talk about who they were, who they wanted to be. If she’d just said yes.

The tears are beyond hiding and breathing is an ordeal in itself. She aches for a slender hand to wipe her face, to tell her that it’s alright. It’s almost dark and she is completely alone. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Idk, it's a beginning of something

The days drag on. After the first night, she doesn’t cry. Nothing breaks through the wall of apathy she’s slowly but surely building around herself, and it isn’t until she wishes a cashier a nice day that she realizes she hasn’t spoken in weeks, had nearly forgotten the sound of her own voice.

Nighttime is bad. Everything feels closer, less muted. She aches at night. Silence creeps along the walls of the apartment and the universe feels claustrophobic, but there is nothing she knows how to do that can make it less so. 

No one calls Lexa, but she hadn’t expected anything else. They had been Costia and Lexa since high school, and it was just Lexa before that. She’s back to being just Lexa and it’s been so long she isn’t sure how anymore.

It seems lonelier than she remembers it being. 

Her workouts increase in intensity, sweat replacing the tears she hasn’t been shedding anyways. Pulling herself up the bar over and over again shapes a rhythm of hurt. It feels good. To ache so physically, to be able to fall asleep right away from pure exhaustion.

Lexa opens her eyes. The ceiling has a thin crack edging down the middle. Her legs hurt. They hurt  _ hard _ , more than they probably should. She sits up and looks around. Everything Costia is gone, leaving a Spartan space with no personality, no signifying marks. Frowning in the slightest, she tries to find a feeling left in her body.

Hurt. Hurt, yes, but also tired. It feels so weary, continuing on as she always has with no-one there to share it with. 

The ring stares at her from the nightstand. The one thing she hasn’t had the heart to get the rid of. In it, she can still see the future. Costia, warm eyes crinkling in the sun. A house, maybe.  _ Something _ . 

Her hand smarts. Lexa looks at it, knuckles scraped and the dent in the wall next to her that’s new.  _ Fuck _ . It’s all she can think before the reality of the situation sets in and sharp pain shoots up her hand, breaks the surface of the bubble she’s been in for so long.

Standing up, her newfound presence in the moment casts new light the apartment. Lexa can’t recognize the space at all. She runs her uninjured hand over the dresser. Catching her own reflection in the mirror, she stops. Deep imprints stamp the skin under her eyes into a dark blue. 

It’s the eyes. She can’t recognize herself in the sad woman looking back at her. Overshadowed and somber, maybe, but it doesn’t look like her. Not like this. 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

The emergency room is  _ loud _ . People keep streaming in with various injuries and Lexa is so deeply overwhelmed that she almost doesn’t hear her name when it’s finally called. She does though, standing startled and moving towards the service counter. Over the past few hours, her conscious has narrowed to the pounding pain in her hand that cuts up towards the wrists in sharp pangs of pain. 

It’s swollen now, and turning a sickly hue of purple. The color is what finally convinced her that it needed professional attention. Now that she’s at that help, she feels somewhat silly and definitely embarrassed. 

The doctor is kind, and she doesn’t ask invasive questions about how she came about the three shattered knuckles and broken middle finger that the x-ray shows. 

Lexa gets to choose her own color for the cast and it feels like the doctor might find it amusing when her eyes take on an almost excited shine. Almost. She chooses blue. 

Sitting in a chair and waiting for the cast to finish drying, she takes a good look at the woman reading some kind of file in a brown folder. Her eyebrows knit together and she keeps looking at Lexa every now and then, and Lexa thinks she should probably, definitely say something. All her answers has been yes or no or a single pain rating that the doctor seems to have taken as a bit below what it actually was.

“Alexandria,” the doctor starts, seemingly startled when she quickly interjects.

“Lexa.” 

When neither of them says anything for a moment too long, she follows it up. “It’s just Lexa, thank you.”

The doctor smiles.

“Lexa. As soon as the cast is done, you’re all set to go.”

She breathes a sigh of relief. Her body is still some kind of electrified from the pain, even more from the subsequent awakening that she’s still processing. A hospital doesn’t feel like the right place to explore feelings that are neither apathy or sorrow for the first time in way too long.

“However,” the doctor resumes, and Lexa’s chest tightens. She has a solid idea where this is headed. “I have to inform you about something in relation to the x-ray.”

Lexa’s jaw tightens and she can’t pick her gaze up off the floor. Every inch of her body is tense as a bow.

The doctor’s eyebrows furrow.

“We took the x-ray of the entirety of your lower arm, a precaution to make sure there wasn’t any undetected injury further up. While there isn’t any current injury, there is what looks like a previous, untreated breakage just above your wrist.” She says it matter-of-factly, no inflection or judgement.

Lexa’s stomach flips, and her heart pounds so hard she has a hard time hearing anything else.

“Now, it might not present an issue as of the moment, but I’d recommend some reparative surgery at some point to make certain it doesn’t become an issue later.” The doctor puts the file down on her desk, looking over at Lexa. Lexa, whose head is hanging so very low.

When she finally picks herself up to meet the gaze, she has steeled her eyes and locked her jaw. “Doctor,” she glances at the white coat the other woman is wearing. “Griffin. Doctor Griffin, I appreciate the information, but surgery is of no interest.” 

She says the last part as she is standing up, quickly gathering her things and leaving with a last glance back. Doctor Griffins intensely blue eyes follow her out of the room.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

There’s bass thumping down the walls and the edges of her vision are starting to blur. It had seemed like a good idea to go out, but it seems like the drinks have hollowed out her chest and every part of her mind is calling out for Costia. 

Lexa thinks, had thought, that this new awareness meant she had finally started to mend. But tears threaten to roll down her cheeks in the middle of whatever bar she has ended up in, and all that’s stopping them is the same thing that started them: an unspecified, if large, amount of drinks. 

The dancefloor is the last place she wants to be, so she hangs back at the bar and lets her face slip into the welcome familiarity of indifference. Even if someone were to get close enough to see the thin film of tears covering her eyes, the room is smoky and so she can explain it away.

The bartender doesn’t strike up conversation, and she’s grateful. She might not be there with anyone, but she refuses to be the lonesome drunk spilling her heart out to the closest thing the nightlife has to a therapist.

A woman walks up to the bar and orders something she can’t make out over the music. What she can make out, however, is that the woman’s gaze keep flicking over to her. She’s pretty. Somewhere below her conscious level of thought, she’s aware that it’s only because her curls are familiar, even if they’re a different color and length. 

It makes her feel some kind of way when she realizes that she technically doesn’t know if Costia still wears her hair the same, if she’s dyed it or shaved it or grown it out, but the train of thought feels like an elephant on her chest and she introduces herself to the woman instead of continuing it.

Or, she tries to. 

And when they go home later, together, Lexa knows that her laugh is more strained than it is when it comes naturally. She knows that the hands sliding down her body doesn’t feel foreign because of their newness to touching her, but because they’re too calloused and too slender to be the hands she want to be touching her. 

She knows that.

But she hasn’t felt anything in months and she’s finally feeling something. It’s overwhelming and full of a tender sadness that somehow aches more than the raw grief ever had, and this is better. 

For some reason, despite the slightly parted lips and thrown back head of this beautiful woman beneath her, it’s the color of the new cast that Lexa glimpses before her eyes close that finally draws a tired smile from her.

When she wakes up, her bed is empty and it’s a relief. There’s something building beneath her skin and she’s pretty certain it’s best explored alone.

Her head pounds and her arm still hurts, but she’s filled to the brim with nervous energy. With some trouble, she manages to clothe herself and brush her teeth. A glance into her fridge tells Lexa of her past few months, empty shelves filled with nothing worth eating. 

She draws an old backpack, tattered and well-loved, from a drawer she hasn’t touched since she had moved into the apartment. 

First, she folds up her sparse amount of clothes and stuffs them into the backpack. Really, it’s a single change of clothes and two extra pairs of socks and underwear. Barely filling a third of the bag, Lexa continues on. Laying a few select items that had survived the purge of all things Costia out on the bed, she decides against packing any of them. 

The ring. She can’t help but stop and stare at it for a long, long moment. It feels like it stares back.

Grabbing it, she weighs it in her hand. It feels so small. She throws it in the air, catching it in the other hand and finally deciding.

Adding it as a pendant on the chain she’s already wearing around her neck, Lexa finally leaves the now completely barren space of her apartment. All that remains of her years there are a bed, a dresser, a mirror, and the little pile of discarded stuff. She brings along her extra key and immediately goes to cancel her lease.

Things finally feel in motion.  


End file.
